Monthly Archives: February 2011

“Why did my alarm go off so early? Do I have to go to work? At a job?!”

How could this happen? Just the other day I was lounging about in my bathrobe, sipping a morning gin and fingerpainting my walls with Cheeto dust.

What’s changed? Why can’t I just do what I want?

My spine quivered when the answer hit.

“Oh, no… Saturday! It’s gone!”

I was afraid to look out the front door, for fear that the others might be rioting at this news. But I couldn’t just lock myself in here forever (obviously not… since it wasn’t Saturday anymore).

I tiptoed onto the porch, and to my surprise the rest of the townspeople were not smashing windows or chucking molotovs.

They just looked beaten down. Had someone gotten to them?

Somber-faced men and women with combed hair drearily schlepped into their autos, a briefcase in one hand and a coffee in the other. It felt like someone was squeezing my heart as I witnessed this madness, this defeat.

And then I saw him over our partition, and jumped so high my willy almost got covered by my open robe.

“Ah! Pete!” I screamed.

“Yeah? What?”

“What are you doing, you fool!”

“I’m going to work. It’s Monday.”

“Damn it, Pete. When did this happen?”

“Hmmm. About midnight last night.”

“Oh, in the cloak of darkness… sneaky.”

“Yeah, it really sucks, but what can we do about it?”

“Pete! You can’t just give in! This is our fight. They can’t do this to us. Think about how great it was back when it was Saturday!”

“Aahhh, yeah. That was sweet. What ever happened to that?”

“I’m not sure, but we can’t stand for it. This… this is tyranny, Pete.”

“God damn it, you’re right. I can’t believe I even went this far with this bullshit!”

He tore off his tie like a wildman and threw his coffee against my garage before drop kicking his briefcase into the bougainvillea.

“Come on, Pete, there’s an uprising a-brewin’, and I for one ain’t gonna stand for this fucking, Monday, shit!”

“Bring Saturday back!”

“Bring Saturday back!”

We called a network of our most radical allies and took to the cellar to make picket signs. It worked in the ’60s, damn it, and it can work again.

By dusk we were drained of energy, and our hands hurt from pounding angrily on tabletops.

Thankfully, academia by now had latched on to this trend, and we could feed our intellectual fury with a new special on the BBC called “Gregory Harrison: The Logical Imperative that it be Saturday.”

A brief sample of the esteemed neuroscientist’s lecture:

Imagine for a moment a world in which Saturday doesn’t exist. We don’t even get Sunday. Try to envision a world in which all human beings wake up at 7:30 without any morning beer, go to work because they have to, come home, and there still aren’t any cartoons on.

I can gauge by your reactions that most of us are in agreement that — to put it mildly — this is not a world best suited for human flourishing. And yet every day we get messages from well-educated and otherwise sane members of the philosophical and scientific communities telling us that this isn’t terrible — that we’re just not looking at the situation from all sides.

Does anyone else see a problem with this? Saturday is, by all accounts, much better than the other days.

Now, it seems that all you have to do, to grasp my argument, is accept the claim that a world in which there is at least one Saturday is drastically more wonderful than a world where there is none. And this opens up a continuum, where we see intervals of wonderful experiences appear closer and closer together in direct correlation to the amount of Saturday in existence for each of these hypothetical worlds. What follows is the logical and moral imperative that it be Saturday again.